This research reframes the housing crisis as a problem of ownership design rather than a malfunction of supply, demand or affordability. It argues that housing is not a neutral good entering markets but a juridical–spatial construct produced through overlapping rights, regulations and classifications. The central concept is legal mixture: a condition in which multiple claims attach to the asset and cannot be resolved through clean spatial separation. Borrowed from Roman law doctrines for inseparable materials, mixture treats ownership as divisible and relational, requiring law to recompose entitlements when boundaries collapse. Contemporary housing systems generalise this condition. Multi-unit buildings are interdependent yet must be made legible as tradable property. Legal techniques therefore in effect substitute rule-governed allocations for thing-based ownership, preserving exclusion, transferability while the underlying asset remains indivisible. Under this lens, the housing crisis appears less as scarcity and more as recurrent instability generated when enclosure is intensified through ever finer formalisation of rights, responsibilities and restrictions. Methodologically, the project mobilises three linked ideas. Honoré’s ‘bundle of rights’ specifies ownership as a modular set of incidents that can be rearranged. ‘Legal mixture’ explains why such rearrangement is structurally required for housing. The ‘Legal Cadastral Domain Model’ provides a formal language for representing how persons, rights and spatial objects are assembled. The outcome is an analytic framework that makes visible how crisis is produced through the continuous work of separating, coding and transferring housing as property, and why interventions focused only on delivery risk reproducing the same conditions.

Rocky Yeh (Ron-Fu Yeh) is a PhD candidate at the Architectural Association, where he also completed his MArch, BA and Foundation studies. He is also currently practising as a RIBA Part 2 architectural assistant, combining academic research with architectural practice.